Fedora Weekly News Issue 289

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 289[1] for the two weeks ending January 3, 2012. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Happy New Year, Fedora folk! This first issue of 2012 is an abbreviated one, but we we at FWN want to ensure that we have some Fedora content coming to you every week! In this week's issue, we cover one development announcement, a rebuild of rawhide with GCC 4.7. We've also got pointers to the many Fedora events happening over the next few months globally. In Fedora In the News this week, four articles/postings related to Fedora, including an interview with Harish Pillay, Global Community and Technology Architect, Red Hat Inc, a review of Fedora-based Kororaa Linux 16, and two personal reflections on linux distributions in 2011 and Fedora's strength in security. We close the issue with security patches released in the last two weeks for Fedora 15 and 16. Enjoy!

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Rebuild for GCC-4.7

"[S]tarting immediately there is going to be a mass rebuild of rawhide for gcc-4.7 that landed yesterday.

as approved by FESCo (https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/739)
packagers will have just over a week, until Thursday Jan 12 to build
packages themselves. After that date releng will kick off an automated
mass rebuild of everything else.

So please get building as Fedora 17 branching is less than 5 weeks
away. we need all built by then

Fedora Events

The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning.
Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding.
In plain words, Fedora events are the exclusive and source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Three greatest successes in Linux world 2011

"Fedora produced two released this year, same as OpenSuSE and Ubuntu
And both of them were lovely from my point of view. Fedora 15 was the
first distribution to feature GNOME3 as default desktop environment. And
it was already awesome, even though not without a glitch. Fedora 16
became even better. What is about Fedora KDE? As I have written, Fedora
15 KDE was very good, and Fedora 16 KDE was even better."

4 security features in Fedora 16

"The security features in Fedora make it one of my favorite Linux
distributions. And that is partly why it is in my list of the top 6 KDE
distributions of 2011, even though it takes some tweaking to get it to
the it just works state. I will take the security advantages of an
operating system over any user-friendliness weaknesses, provided those
user-friendliness weaknesses are not show stoppers."

"When you design something or build something with security in mind, you
are always cognizant of the fact that you can have ten measures and if
everything works fine, that's great. But on the other side, the other
person needs to succeed just once! Whatever ten things you have that is
successful, is done away with this one failure. Well that is the story
in the proprietary perspective. In the open source perspective,
everything that we build is completely transparent. Everybody knows what
we are building."

Kororaa Linux 16 - A Fedora++ Distribution

"To get a better overview of Kororaa Linux, the ideas behind it, what it
includes and why, check their web page. My take on it is this - if you
have looked at Fedora before, and you didn't want to use it because of
the difficulty and tedium of getting a lot of common non-FOSS packages
installed, then you should take a look at Kororaa. Of course, if you are
a FOSS-purist, you are likely to think that Kororaa is an abomination."